Social Media eWOM for Apparel Brands: Investigating Consumers' Attitudes and Purchase Intentions

Abstract

Marketers have started incorporating social media as a crucial part to their marketing communication strategies. Since the electronic word of mouth is an important element of social media and plays a huge role in attracting more customers for companies, it is important to investigate it. This thesis looks into the impact of positive eWOM on social media on brand attitudes and purchase intentions of customers. The research looks into the impact of positive eWOM in the context of Pakistan and Pakistani apparel industry. This research investigated three variables, which are: social eWOM, brand attitudes and purchase intention. The researcher conducted an online survey to observe the relationship between these variables for apparel brands in context of Pakistan. There was one independent variable: positive eWOM, one dependent variable: purchase intention and one mediating variable: brand attitude. The research was conducted with the help of data, which was collected through social media platforms. The questionnaire for the research was made on Google Forms and was then sent to survey participants through Facebook and Whatsap. Three hundred respondents, belonging to three different cities, were involved in the survey. The findings of the research indicated that there is indeed a positive relationship between all the variables and that brand attitude does play a mediating role between positive eWOM and purchase intention. At the end of the research, future research directions were also outlined by the researcher